Natalia Piper was busy playing her general contractor business in Los Angeles when, in June, a random message appeared on WhatsApp.
“Someone ordered me to post a negative assessment of your business,” the message said from a Pakistan telephone number. “I received the order to post 20 reviews.”
Startled, Piper replied asking who had placed the request. Just responding, she has already fallen into a blow that targets small businesses around the world.
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Scammers are extorting companies for hundreds of dollars each, threatening to post fake negative values on Google Maps-or posting these reviews and then requiring payment to remove them, according to reports from various companies and data from a sector overseer.
Criminals target small businesses that depend greatly on online evaluations to attract customers – such as moving, roof and appliance repair companies. Negative evaluations can overthrow the company’s grade and damage your reputation on the Internet, which can cost thousands in lost revenue. In addition, these reviews are difficult to remove from Google after being published.
Piper had already paid $ 150 to someone else who used a bangladesh number to remove negative ratings that had been posted. Then the Pakistan person contacted, and she paid $ 100 to remove the reviews. Weeks later, another 10 fake reviews appeared on her profile. This time she didn’t pay, and Google () ended up removing the evaluations after her report them.
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Piper said that before false evaluations were removed, his business note, Build Solutions, on Google had fallen from 5.0 to 3.6 stars.
“It took me eight years to build my reputation in the market, and a guy can destroy it in one day,” she said in an interview.
Although many consumers see online ratings as a valuable source to guide your purchases, the internet notes are often manipulated. Companies like Google and Amazon remove hundreds of millions of fake reviews a year, but many are still unnoticed.
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Scammers have enjoyed this flawed system for years. And artificial intelligence tools have only increased the problem, allowing them to create large -scale realistic false evaluations.
“There is an entire underworld behind what you see online, which people just don’t know,” said Kay Dean, a former federal criminal investigator who has been following these blows for months with Fake Review Watch, a supervisory body she created to monitor the fake review market. She identified more than 150 companies worldwide that were the target of false negative evaluations.
Supervisory bodies and companies mainly blame Google and other evaluation sites for not doing enough, arguing that moderation decisions are opaque and that few tools exist so that companies control their reputation online.
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“These companies are being extorted, and Google is not doing enough to prevent it,” Dean said.
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has created a new rule in 2024 to combat fake evaluations, but it is focused mainly on companies that buy false positive assessments for themselves. Regulation has not imposed new requirements for evaluation platforms such as Google, Yelp or Amazon, which, under federal law known as Section 230, have wide protection on the content published on their websites.
In an e-mail statement, a FTC spokesman said that “evaluations should reflect the honest opinion of the evaluator” and that those responsible for false reviews may face “civil penalties of more than $ 53,000 per occurrence.” The FTC sometimes works with other governments to stop foreign scammers or forward cases to the Justice Department.
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Google allows companies to report fake evaluations, but does not offer a channel for business owners to talk directly to someone in the company.
Piper said he tried to contact Google by various means, even by the advertising department, where it invests thousands to promote your business in the search engine. She said she did not receive help.
“As long as these reviews do not disappear, you do not receive calls, and no clients want to hire you,” he said.
In an email statement, a Google spokesman said the company removes “the vast majority of fraudulent content even before they are seen” and has already restricted more than 900,000 accounts that repeatedly violated their policies.
“We have not tolerated google Maps blows and took several measures against them, including content removal, suspension of accounts and lawsuits,” said the spokesman. She added that Google plans to launch a tool for companies to report when they are the target of scammers, but gave no more details.
Piper said that removing his cell phone number from the business pages prevented new scammers from contacting it by WhatsApp, which ended the blow. She advised other companies in her network to do the same.
One of the accounts that posted fake negative assessments for Piper’s business did the same with more than 30 other companies, according to data collected by Dean. Among them, a Drywall company in Covington, Washington, and a keychain in Switzerland.
One of the fake accounts that Mirou Piper also attacked Nick Betourney, who runs a change company in Lawrenceville, Georgia.
Betourney spent years promoting her business and trying to get genuine evaluations for Budget Moving Services, a company she founded six years ago. Over time, he got a 5 -star note on Google Maps.
But on August 11, he received a message on WhatsApp saying that someone had ordered 20 fake 1 star reviews for his page.
“They are after smaller businesses, basically, which are service companies that do not receive as many ratings as a restaurant or a Walmart,” Betourney said in an interview. He reported the reviews, and Google removed them quickly. But the next day, five fake 1 star reviews appeared again.
“It wasn’t just that ‘the service was bad,” he said. “These were absurd things, like they had broken a box, which the porters intentionally took a box and crushed it on the floor in front of me.”
The person who contacted Betourney used the name Rashid Ghallu on the WhatsApp profile and a Pakistan number. When contacted by The New York Times, he said his business is writing fake Google Maps ratings, charging $ 100 for 20 reviews. He denied extorting companies with negative assessments, saying he receives contracts from unpeictional clients to post negative assessments and that he contacts companies before to offer the option to pay.
Patterns such as Dean’s observed – in which false accounts bombard several companies in different places with negative assessments within a few days or weeks – should be easy for Google to identify and remove, she said. But evaluations are usually online until companies report them individually.
“It’s an ocean of misinformation,” she said, “and people really don’t have the time or ability to separate what is real from what is false.”
c.2025 The New York Times Company
